Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City

It was cold for reminiscing, but I didn’t want to let him down too abruptly. “That was a… certain amount of time ago,” I said. “And a little farther downtown.”

Oona went on affixing posters wherever she could, her breath billowing steam as she warmed herself with the effort, her scrappy winding dance with the dispenser making her resemble a kind of bat in her black layers and loose hair. I felt I should take her example, but it seemed to me the bear-only version, which was what I carried, when bound to a lamppost looked far too much like a “lost dog” flyer, only one lacking a phone number and the promise of a reward.

“This way-” Perkus whisked us from block to block, searching, I think, for the door into 1988 or thereabouts. In lieu of this we slapped a desultory photocopy on a bus shelter or two, always lowering heads guiltily at the sight of passersby, ordinary Manhattanites whom I couldn’t keep from suspecting we’d typically meet at book parties or gallery openings-me and Oona, that is. But tonight we were enveloped in Perkus’s cloak of banditry. We should have been smoking cheroots and sporting eye patches. Whatever reputation Perkus might have once conjured for himself by his vigilante dissertations, these present scraps of visual noise couldn’t have been more meaningless on these walls if they’d been gum wrappers. The meaning resided in our gesture, silly as it was. Or there was no meaning. I began stuffing our posters into trash cans when the others weren’t looking. I would have liked to set them afire to warm our hands, but I suspected that might have finally drawn some quality-of-life-enforcement attention.

Circling back to Perkus’s at last, bankrupt of posters due to my illicit disposals, speaking with chattering teeth of the coffee Perkus was about to brew, we found ourselves confronted at his doorstep not by the usual Brandy’s drunks-it really was too chilly tonight-but by a weird sentinel presence planted in our path. He wore a long leather coat with a floppy buckle, a thick-ribbed purple turtleneck rising from inside the coat’s wide collar, and an absurd imperial fur tower of a hat, under which glared the whites of his eyes in a mask of darkness, making him resemble Orson Welles as Othello. But that mask wasn’t blackface. We all had been primed by Perkus to be met by some figure of authority, and Biller’s new costume looked anything but secondhand. He might have been deputized to arrest us, if the mayor’s graffiti squad had been configured on a Blaxploitation theme. Biller was famously boycotted from the building, but it was hard to imagine Perkus’s neighbors challenging him now. Somebody had laid out some money to dress the homeless man this way. Then I remembered that Biller wasn’t homeless anymore. The other day Perkus had been trying to explain Biller’s weird new apartment, where Biller lived, Perkus said, “with forty or fifty dogs.” I chalked the dogs up to exaggeration, and forgot about the apartment until now.

Before I could express my surprise, Perkus and Biller embraced, Perkus vanishing for an instant into the larger man’s clasp. “Come inside, it’s too cold,” said Perkus. “You want some coffee, Biller?”

“That would be nice.” His voice was still gentle, even meekly hesitant, but now you imparted to this gentleness a certain majesty, a noble restraint. The clothes made the man.

“You’re looking fantastic,” said Perkus, sweeping us all inside. If there was a grain of overcompensation in Perkus’s heartiness with Biller, I assumed this had less to do with any guilt toward the silent wandering figure than a relief that the timing of Biller’s appearance would blot out contemplation of the lame broadsiding session. (In fact, we’d never mention it again.) “So, you know Chase and Oona, don’t you?” Perkus asked belatedly. Well, Biller did or didn’t, but he nodded, taking us in together as Perkus’s introduction had suggested, ChaseandOona .

Indoors, we defrosted our paper-cut fingertips around stingingly hot mugs while Perkus prompted Biller to explain his new good fortune, the respectability he’d attained through the strange backdoor of his laptop computer, or explain it as well as he could, anyway, to us Internet primitives. Biller sat, his shiny leather coat and monstrous hat shed, resplendent in his purple sweater, commandingly patient with our stupidity. Had we heard of Yet Another World? No?

It was difficult to explain, and it didn’t help that Perkus tried to help Biller paint the picture while plainly not grasping it himself. Neither a video game nor an online community, exactly, Yet Another World was, in itself, only a set of templates and tools, “a place with stuff,” in Biller’s words. “A place where you can do things.” You might go there to build a virtual house, to furnish it with the virtual objects you liked. Much of it, according to Biller, was pretty much like the world out here-homes, with belongings inside. You also made yourself , there behind the screen, and the self you made was something Biller called an “avatar.” Again, many visitors to Yet Another World settled for realism in this regard, their avatars little more than digitally prettified versions of their usual selves, spines a little straighter, waists narrower, tits bigger, and so on. Many were content to shamble through this potential paradise in cliques of sexy avatars browsing virtual shops and cruising or flirting, as in a mall. “Man is born free,” Perkus offered, “and everywhere is in chain stores.”

Things got a little more interesting in other precincts, Biller went on to indicate. It was this infinity of possible selves and possible neighborhoods, the total and endless expansibility of Yet Another World, which gave it its magnificence. Deviants and avant-gardists could build neighborhoods as solid, in their way, as those of the suburbanites-kingdoms of barter, Dada, or rape, castles of chaos. Grown-ups masqueraded as children, men as women, and so on. Others created inhuman selves, gorgons, strolling penises, pornified Gnuppets. All ethics were local, and endlessly up for negotiation. Declaring whether Yet Another World was or wasn’t a game might be as difficult as declaring whether life was.

While I was mesmerized, Oona showed her typical impatience once she’d grasped the concept. Like a Noteless chasm, she’d glanced into the unusual thing and now wanted to get back to business, or have a drink and get laid, or whatever. It wasn’t that Oona wasn’t interested in infinity-she was, only just briefly . Possibly it was her ghostwriter’s instincts that made her wish to break the frame of the Escher drawing Biller and Perkus were elaborating before us, and examine it for fingerprints, find the human gist. “Biller,” she interrupted, “if you don’t mind my asking, how did all this admittedly marvelous virtual Communism buy you a real ocelot hat?” It was just like her to have nailed the breed of fur.

Biller understood her question perfectly, but he had to forage for language that would elucidate it to us one-worlders. “There’s a certain kind of stuff people like to collect,” he said. “They call it ‘treasure.’ It’s different from the other stuff in there, it isn’t easy to make. There’s a limit on how much you can make, and it takes a long time, people don’t like that. So you can buy someone else’s treasure, or you can steal it-”

“That’s what you do!” said Oona, exhilarated. “You’re a virtual thief. I love it.”

Biller shook his head, not insulted, just moving at a slower pace and unwilling to be hurried. “I manufacture treasure, and sell it. I’m a craftsman.”

“You mean you sell it to virtual people?” asked Oona.

“Real people,” said Biller. “They pay real money.”